


it was the silence, underneath the stars, that understood my heartbeat and its racing

by Waistcoat35



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Fluff, Hopefully more comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, Now Thomas' skin is clear his crops are watered and all is right with the world, Or at least discussions about it, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Richard Ellis is the cure to everything, Sleepy Cuddles, Storytelling, in which Thomas is a metaphorical dragon, no i won't explain and you can't make me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:07:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23364448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waistcoat35/pseuds/Waistcoat35
Summary: Congrats you've read all of my shit for 6 months and as a reward you get to unlock the hidden Richard Ellis backstory.Trigger warnings: War, war injury, general war stuff, mention of a traumatic bomb/grenade blast, Richard deals w/ survivors' guilt, both he and Thomas have ptsd, reaction to a nightmare that vaguely resembles an anxiety attack, and period-typical homophobia. if there's anything else let me know
Relationships: Thomas Barrow/Richard Ellis
Comments: 8
Kudos: 95





	it was the silence, underneath the stars, that understood my heartbeat and its racing

**Author's Note:**

> Congrats you've read all of my shit for 6 months and as a reward you get to unlock the hidden Richard Ellis backstory.  
> Trigger warnings: War, war injury, general war stuff, mention of a traumatic bomb/grenade blast, Richard deals w/ survivors' guilt, both he and Thomas have ptsd, reaction to a nightmare that vaguely resembles an anxiety attack, and period-typical homophobia. if there's anything else let me know

Richard Ellis is a storyteller, at heart.

According to his parents, though he was a fairly well-behaved baby he was seldom a quiet one, always babbling small nonsenses to himself and anyone who'd listen as he rocked back and forth. "Sometimes," his mother says, "I'd wake up in the night expecting you to be crying, and come to see why you weren't - and you'd just be lying in your cot, wide awake, cooing and babbling away as you looked up at the moon. Strange little one, you were." She laughs, kisses the top of his head as she puts his cup of tea on the table, and he pretends to be more embarrassed than he is, for the show of it.

* * *

Richard Ellis is a storyteller, at heart.

He is the only boy, with three sisters, two younger, and so he is bullied terribly, he will joke to people later on in life. When the youngest is born, Peggy, he holds her in a kitchen chair, his own legs not even touching the ground, when his parents are too busy and whispers to her as she gazes up at him, awestruck. Talking's meant to be good for babies, he says when questioned. "Good thing you never shut up, then," Alice says, goodnatured, the oldest and, if anyone else asked, the bossiest, giving him a gentle poke to the ribs. Everyone chuckles when she repeats it at the dinner table that night, himself included, and at five years old he is too young perhaps to understand how you can laugh at something and still have it hurt in the spaces between your ribs, dull like the ache when he's bumped into a door handle. 

* * *

Richard Ellis is a storyteller, at heart, but sometimes it gets him into trouble.

The trouble with being five is that he has to go to school, and although he enjoys learning things, he'd rather learn them with his dad, out on the moors or in the garden looking at the plants. At school, nobody has time for stories - not his teachers, anyway. 

_Dreamer_ , they call him. _Fanciful, flighty, not a penny's worth of thoughts in his head_. 

He isn't quite sure about that - the idea that imagination makes you stupid. But he is five years old and five year olds tend to be reasonably susceptible to what grown-ups say, so for a good long while he always wonders if, perhaps, his gift for tales means he's just a bit dim - that he isn't focusing on _real_ things. When he comes home with the news that he's not doing especially well in mathematics and his mother asks why, that's what he says, and she looks far more devastated than he would've expected. She sits down at the table next to him, and he only stops nervously swinging his legs in case he kicks her. 

"You're not stupid, Dickie-bird," she says, with a kiss to his cheek. "Not at all. There's nothing wrong with it, if you're good at stories and not good at maths. It's just that some of your teachers might not see it that way. But that's because they were told the same thing when they were your age, and so were the people who told _them_ that things like that are a waste of time. It just goes on and on and on, and it's not good for anyone, and it's only people like you who can stop it. Now," a kiss to his temple, this time, before she gets up to fetch him a cup of tea, "I won't have anyone thinking so ill of themselves in this house, least of all you, because you're my darling Richie, and I don't know anyone who has half so good a knack for tales."

* * *

Richard Ellis is a storyteller, at heart, but the stories don't always work. 

He is chided, at seven years old, for scaring his sister during a thunderstorm. He had thought only to make something up, something about where the thunder comes from, so that she wouldn't be so scared of it - but two year olds are not always very keen on dragons, he has just found, a great shame in itself, though not greater than the shame that coils in him when he hears his father trying to soothe her back to sleep. Very few seven-year-olds know how to hate - they learn it from people around them, and the age at which it is learned simply depends on how lucky you are, he finds later on. But he does feel a creeping dissatisfaction with something that, really, is simply a part of him. 

"I didn't mean to," he says afterwards. "I thought that she'd _like_ the story - I told her that the thunder was the roars of a dragon." His father, sitting on the bottom step with him, laughs in the way that makes the corners of his eyes crinkle. 

"That _is_ an excellent idea," he admits. "But Peggy's only little - a dragon must seem quite scary to her, especially when it's already so dark and loud outside." Richard sags slightly. 

"I didn't _mean_ for her to be scared, though," he says. "It wasn't a very scary dragon. People thought he was, but he was just grumpy because he was lonely. He wore a waistcoat and hoarded old pocket watches and grandfather clocks." He feels a large, warm hand on his shoulder, steady. 

"The trouble with stories, Richie," his father says, "is that not everyone is ready for them, and not everyone understands them all of the time. That's not your fault, and it's not always theirs, either. But you've got a gift for them, and you wanted to use it to help her. And when you've gotten a little older, and come into your own, I daresay the world will be a better place for stories."

Richard Ellis is not entirely sure if being a storyteller is always a good thing, but maybe that depends on what 'good' means.

* * *

Richard Ellis is a storyteller whose heart is broken.

He's been out here for too long to properly remember how it feels to be anywhere else, and he'd want to go home except he can't entirely remember what that feels like either. He has memories of how it's _meant_ to feel, of course, and he's thought over them again and again, like a photograph you've taken out and smoothed over too many times until it's wrinkled anyway. He could not tell stories about his home.

That's just as well - out here, with the gunning and bombing and shelling, the constant noise worrying at his ears and gnawing at his nerves, he doesn't think anybody wants to hear about home. They've got their own homes to get back to, their own people to miss, and they can't mourn somebody else's past as well as their own. But there are some nights, in the trenches, when the dark is more suffocating than usual, and the idea that there is nobody else out there is worse than the idea of the enemies in a trench not so far away. So he still tells stories - he just makes them up. Fantastical ones they all would've expected to hear as kids. He even tells them the one about the dragon, and they all agree they'd have rather thought that _that_ was where thunder came from. (Some days, when they can hear the distant roar of gunfire in another trench miles away, that's what he tells himself the sound is.) 

He looks around, at all of the men listening intently, and remembers what his father had said, and for once he's certain that he's doing something worthwhile.

* * *

Richard Ellis was a storyteller, and he's not sure he ever will be again.

He hadn't seen it coming, should've _noticed_ , but he hadn't seen and he hadn't noticed until he was being thrown through the air and smacked back into the sludge with shrapnel clustering his back, too late to be any good to anyone. There'd been a ringing in his ears, and it was all he could hear, which he now finds to be a damn lucky thing, because he's not sure he'd ever sleep again if he'd heard the screaming. He thinks of the men who'd sat around him in the trench on summer nights when the world felt too big and too small at the same time, listening to his stories as if they helped anything, and then he wishes he hadn't, because every single one of them is dead and will never hear a story again. 

He can't remember what he'd been thinking about when they'd been hit by the blast, and he's never been so grateful for anything, because if he could remember and he'd been dreaming away as usual, if he'd been paying less than his full attention, he'd never forgive himself for as long as he lives. There's no good in any of it, any more, because it helps nobody and does nothing, and he's never felt so small, not even when he was five years old. He wants to go home, but he's not quite sure that he deserves to when there's five other men - among millions more - who never will. 

He curls up in the makeshift bed in the hospital, on his side instead of his back, and tries to ignore the stinging of his wounds and the fact that the emptiness in his head is louder than all of his busy, bumbling thoughts ever were. 

* * *

Richard Ellis is heartbroken, but he thinks he might be a storyteller again. 

One night he's jolted awake by a yell that changes into a dry, rasping cough, and when he scrambles to turn over in his bed he finds one of the other patients in the next one, being tended by Nurse Honeywicke. He's woken from a night terror and torn his stitches in the process, and now waits, grimacing, while she gets the kit to stitch him back up. As if he'd known he was being watched all along, he turns his head and meets Richard's eyes. "Oi," he says, "You. Ellis, isn't it."

Richard nods, and then confirms it aloud, because it's dark and he might not have seen. The other man seems satisfied enough with the answer, in either form, because he beckons him closer. Richard shuffles around until he can sit on the edge of his bed, looking across at him, blinking owlishly in the light of the lamp that the nurse has just put on. "Can I help you, Mr...?" he asks, and he supposes it's a daft question - he doesn't have much medical training, merely the minimum required to get in, and with everything stiff and aching as it is he doubts he'd do a good job even if it was required. 

"You can," comes the reply. "Berkeley. Lance Corporal Berkeley. Or was, anyway. Look, this is going to bloody hurt, so if you wouldn't mind making a distraction of yourself for a few minutes while I get patched up that'd be brilliant." Richard blinks a few more times, bewildered, and perhaps to delay having to process that he's being asked to do something he doesn't know if he can, anymore. He says as much, but Berkeley won't have it. "Course you can," he says. "Every-bugger else in this place can't seem to _stop_ talking about themselves, and I managed to ask the one bloke who won't. Typical." He makes as if to turn back over and bear the stitching in disgruntled silence, but something sparks in Richard, because he's spent God knows how long feeling sorry for himself because he couldn't help people, and now here he is passing up the opportunity to finally do so. He can almost hear his mother chiding him for being contrary. 

"Alright," he says, trying to still the shaking of his hands. "Alright." Berkeley turns around again. "Any preference as to what story I should tell?" Berkeley shakes his head, short and sharp, before thinking better of it. 

"No girls," he says shortly. "If there's one thing I'm sick of hearing about in this place, it's that. If you've heard about one of 'em, you've heard about all of 'em. And babies. If you've got a new kid, s'not much to me at this point." Richard isn't quite sure he agrees with the sentiment - though all the men talk about their girls the same way, he has serious doubts about their not possessing some form of individuality. But Berkeley wants him to waffle on, and so waffle on he must, and he might as well just be relieved that the one thing he _can't_ talk about is the one thing the man doesn't _want_ him to talk about. Instead, he thinks for a moment, mind rusty from lack of use over the last few weeks, until in the end he panics and just picks something, as silly as it might seem. He tells him about his father's workbench and his toolshed - about a neighbour who came knocking at all hours complaining about the hammering and sawing, even though she let her children run around and shriek and steal apples from the garden everyday. He tells about when she wanted her gate fixed, and his father had done something to it - messed with the hinges or put in a faulty latch, something like that, he doesn't remember what - and the next thing Mrs Arrimore knew, her goat had taken off into her front garden from around the back and started eating her washing. Berkeley is barking with laughter by the end of it, the nurse not bothering to shush him since the ward is nearly empty, and Richard feels something come back to him with that laugh. Something he didn't think he was ever going to get back. Then Berkeley's stitches are done with, and his arm is rebandaged, and they roll over and go back to sleep as though nothing had ever happened. 

Except, now, Richard hasn't rolled back over - he stays on his right side, facing Berkeley's bed this time, and in the little moonlight flooding in he still sees the Lance Corporal's eyes darkly twinkling with mirth. He smiles, hoping he sees it but also hoping he doesn't, and as he drifts off he thinks he sees it returned.

Berkeley writes, once he's back home in Loughborough, and they continue to write for some years after. They don't meet up - they're a little too different, perhaps, to manage that. Unless there's a hidden softness in Berkeley that Richard hasn't managed to tease out, he gets the feeling that Berkeley is a millstone he'd wear himself away on eventually. But they had met when they were both perfectly miserable, and made each other less so, and he won't forget the man after that. 

* * *

Richard Ellis is a storyteller, and he uses it well.

The Royal household doesn't have time for stories, save when they're certain ones. The ones that make him fit in with what is uniform, the ones that toe the line, and so those are the ones he tells. He has a feeling Miss Lawton knows that, but if she does then she doesn't indicate she cares. 

When they get to Downton he makes sure dinner is less frosty than it would've otherwise been, with the way the Royal troupe carry on. There is stony silence from the rest of them, the occasional scathing remark from Lawton, and only the barest attempts at civility from the already-present house staff, so Richard is the talker. He feels stupid fr it, but he wears it like a second skin, always has, knows how to get the conversation going, and the chilly atmosphere is broken. The young butler - the young, funny, very very _handsome_ butler - looks at him, grateful.

* * *

Richard Ellis is a storyteller, and his heart has gone out to Thomas Barrow.

"Talk to me about something," Thomas rasps from the passenger seat, clearly terrified by the idea of silence after all that's happened, "anything." Richard doesn't choose some random distant memory, but the memory of his father telling him about the world not being ready for him, and that not being his fault. (He had said, technically, that it wasn't always anyone else's fault either - but in this case he was wrong.) 

It seems to help Mr Barrow, to know he's not alone.

* * *

Richard Ellis is a storyteller, at heart, and this is the first person in ages who's listened and not had it be a front or a farce. He tells Thomas anything and everything, calling almost if not every night, and the laughter down the phone is carried with him every day, in his breast pocket closest to his heart. 

* * *

Richard is a storyteller at heart, and the latest one he's told his parents is all about Thomas. He doesn't mention a name, or a place, or a job, but his mother knows anyway, somehow.

"Is he the friend?" She asks as they drink cocoa on the back step and look up at the moon. Her hand is gentling at the crook of his elbow, a silent reminder - _you don't have to if you don't want to_. "The one you went for a drink with, after you looked in on us last summer?" He smiles, nods.

"The one I was _late_ to a drink with, that is." She tuts, but it's halfhearted, because she knows full well she's the one who wouldn't let him out the door for three hours. He doesn't mention it again, because he'd missed Christmas the year before that one and that summer was his attempt to make it up to her. 

"He sounds lovely, from what you've said." He hasn't said that much - can she tell so easily? His smile turns rueful. 

"He is. He deserved better than what happened to him, though." He'd told her about it next he saw her, not wanting to over the phone, and it feels like he's destined to feel guilt for things nobody else is willing to blame him for. "If I hadn't let him down-" She turns and takes his face in both hands, deadly serious. 

"Dickie. You _got him out._ Nobody else I know would've put what you did on the line, to help someone they'd not long met. It wasn't your fault. The only people to blame are the people who do this to blokes who haven't done a thing wrong." She's scowling, so he knows she means it. 

"Why do they do it?" He asks, and he hates how the question quivers. "Why do they do this to us?" She sighs, squeezes his hand, sad.

"It's just as I told you when you were little. Because someone taught them to hate, and whoever taught them was taught in turn, and so on and so forth," she says. The cocoa's growing cold. "And people like you two are the ones who didn't learn it the way they did. They don't like that, and they'll try and teach you to hate too. To hate yourself. And don't you let them. Dickie-bird," and she's serious again, looking right into him, "you mustn't let them. Promise me, you won't." He sighs, tired.

"I'll try my best, mum." 

The rest of the stories are happier - funny things Thomas has said or done when they're together, about how nicely his handwriting loops, much nicer than Richard's scrawl, too slow for his thoughts. His mother asks him to promise to bring Thomas next time, and again he says he'll try.

* * *

Richard Ellis is a storyteller at heart, and his way with words means he persuades Thomas to come and meet his parents. Or maybe it's his natural charm. Either way, they adore him, and so do Alice and Theresa and Peggy. When Richard tells his parents stories about them both, this time, Thomas can join in.

* * *

Richard Ellis is a storyteller, at heart. 

On a cool night in autumn, around October, a little over two years after they met, he's lying in bed in his - theirs now, he likes to say, it's just that one of the owners works in Yorkshire a lot of the time - London flat, head propped up in his hand, right elbow leaning on the pillow, left arm wrapped securely around Thomas, snugly over his ribs, under his armpits, all the way. The sky is clear and though he can't see the stars as he would at home (his _childhood_ home, that is - his current definition of home is just as close to Thomas as he can be at that point in time) they're still dotted in the dark like spatters of paint when the brush is flicked at the canvas. It isn't quite that he _can't_ sleep - more that he doesn't feel as if he needs to. He ought to, really, ought to make the most of the fact he sleeps sounder with Thomas to hold, but accompanied by this is the fact that when he has him here he can't bring himself to spend any less than the maximum possible time awake and paying attention to Thomas. He lies there, awake but not alert, content but not drowsy, and simply sees and hears and feels as each breath puffs Thomas' chest out and back in again, like the swash and backwash of the tide. He's warm in Richard's arms, a curled-up bony beanbag softly snoring, sleepy breaths ruffling raven hair. The peace is shattered, however, when his breath stutters suddenly, rattles like a faulty car engine, the same sound he hears from frightened horses and himself when things get too much and he struggles to breathe. Thomas twitches, and then jerks, and then jolts awake, and would be bolt upright if it weren't for Richard's arm still wrapped tight around him. 

He seems to panic for a moment as he tries to wriggle out of the tight grip, and once Richard realises he retracts the arm immediately so that Thomas can prop himself on his elbows, turned to the right, towards the window and away from Richard, panting like he's run a race and half-leaning over the edge of the bed like he might be ill. One elbow slides out and gives way on the slippery sheets, and Richard surges forwards and puts the arm around him again, just in time to stop him from falling off the edge or hitting his head on the wall. Shivers wrack Thomas' frame that weren't there before, likely from the shock of the sudden loss of balance as well as the nightmare, and he twists for a moment before Richard murmurs "Me, love, s'just me, shh, that's it," until the tension seeps from Thomas' shoulders like blood from a wound, and he makes a cut-off, animal sort of noise as he goes limp in Richard's hold. He always apologises, afterwards, for reacting the way he sometimes does upon waking, and Richard always refuses to accept - Thomas is just confused and frightened, he always says, and to wake up in a place you don't normally sleep in when already remembering somewhere from a dream adds up to worsen things. The extent of Thomas' panic tells him that tonight probably took him back to the trenches, and when he goes there it's hard to get him back.) Richard had helped to catch his niece's rabbit when it escaped its hutch once, and when he held it to his chest he could feel its' heartbeat - not just in his hands but thrumming through him from that point of contact. It had been endless, racing, strong as the drumbeat of a marching band when the vibrations travel though the flagstones, and Thomas' pulse feels just the same now. Richard forces him not to let his own match it, to keep his breathing slow and steady as he holds Thomas, leaning close enough that Thomas can feel his breathing and try to mirror it. 

Eventually it works, as it thankfully so often does, and Thomas regains himself enough to turn around in Richard's arms and flop down into the mattress, on his left side now, facing Richard. He huffs afterwards as if that alone had exhausted him, and swallows, the click of it telling of a dry throat. Though he's willing to, Richard does not try to leave for a glass of water - any time he has after one of the dreams, Thomas has been in a bad way when he's gotten back, the dark of the night encroaching too much without Richard's presence. They're lucky the sky is clear. Some nights, clouds pass over the moon like charcoal dust - those are the worse ones. But the moon is full tonight, and the pale light that made Thomas look so beautiful, so serene in sleep is helping to calm him now. "Thanks," he says, voice not above a murmur as he tucks his knees higher, curling up on his side. He looks tired, and Richard feels the need to touch him again. He lifts his arm again and slides it up Thomas' back until it reaches his shoulderblades, smooths slowly up and down, and he settles. 

"Want to tell me about it?" Thomas shakes his head softly.

"Don't feel like putting it into words. Sometimes it helps, but - not when I'm back there. They're all the same, anyway. You've been - you've seen." He nods. It's true, he has seen, but not the exact same things as Thomas - that's why he always asks. "You tell me something, instead."

Richard nods, obliging. "Like what?" Thomas shrugs, a little shy under Richard's soft, indulgent smile. 

"Anything, really. Just - tell me about something that's not there. Something you wouldn't find there, at all. So I saw it, I'd know I wasn't back there."

Richard is a storyteller, at heart. He knows he can do that. So he talks about the rabbit. About chasing it up and down the garden, tripping over his own shoelaces at least twice, his niece's worried tears dissolving in the wake of it, his sister leaning in the doorway stirring a cup of tea and laughing at him silently. He tells about feeling its thunderclap flickerbeat heart racing once he'd picked it up, but he also tells about how it curled into him, let him hold it for another ten minutes to calm it, sat in a garden chair at the patio table with a cup of tea nearby while he smoothed a hand over its head and down its lithe bramblebranch spine, gentled its ears. He tells about the way its fur smelled like the freshly-cut grass, how he handed it off to his niece afterwards and watched as it was released into its pen with a great leap, a flash of a cottonball tail like a star. 

"W's a good story," Thomas mumbles at the end, as he more or less tucks himself into Richard's embrace again, nuzzling into his collarbone as he drags his legs forward. One slots between Richard's, the other hooking over the top of his left ankle, Thomas' knee poking him neatly at the back of his own knee. It's a complicated placement of limbs, as are many of their sleeping arrangements, but mostly he just has to lie still and soft and pliable as Thomas weaves himself into the spaces Richard leaves like a dunnock through briar, his words and breaths and love interlocking between Richard's ribs like climbing clematis through a trellis. "Thank you." And he knows that it's for much more than the story. 

Thomas nods off like this, breaths coming slow against Richard's throat, and he rests his chin on Thomas' crown and lets himself finally drift. He has a job, a role, and he has found that stories have much more of a use than he'd thought they would. It's his job to see where things have gone wrong, and make them okay again. Thomas' hair smells of lavender soap, and as he breathes it in he thinks he's done just that.

**Author's Note:**

> Writing Playlist:  
> \- Guiltless - dodie  
> \- And I Love Him - Benjamin Gibbard  
> \- The Trouble With Wanting - Joy Williams  
> \- Wonder - Lauren Aquilina  
> \- Constellations - The Oh Hellos  
> \- Baobabs - Regina Spektor  
> \- Home - Gabrielle Aplin  
> \- North - Sleeping At Last  
> \- Meteor Shower - Owl City  
> \- There Beneath - The Oh Hellos  
> \- Square - Mitski
> 
> UPDATE: forgot to add - this fic is dedicated to everyone whose nan calls them dickie-bird despite it having literally nothing whatsoever to do with their name


End file.
